How Voters Cause Washington’s Gridlock

It’s all too common today to portray regular Americans as the victims of dysfunctional politicians. It’s certainly true that in recent years those in public office seem unable to make the combination of tough choices and difficult compromises necessary for our government to function. But elected decision makers don’t operate in a vacuum; they’re not self-selected autonomous actors who willfully refuse to work together as matters of personal choice or political temperament.

Those decision makers, after all, were chosen by the very voters now complaining of dysfunction. And there is no basis for harshly condemning the elected while expressing sympathy for the electorate whose decisions put politicians in office. After all, the desires of the voters are a major influence on how officeholders behave once they are in power.

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The electorate as a whole has established the basis for gridlock by its biennial display of schizophrenia. In 2008, the people put Barack Obama in power, with a Democratic congressional majority. Two years later they gave the House to people who had made clear their determination to both do everything possible to stop Obama from achieving anything he wanted to accomplish and also to undo everything he had already done. Two years later, in 2012, they switched back to Barack Obama, renewing his mandate—only to revert to empowering his unrelenting opponents in 2014.

To repeat a point I have made here earlier, this alternation of electoral winners has been particularly stressful because our Constitution staggers terms of federal officeholders. Had the winner in each cycle gained with their victory the ability to enact their agendas, we would not have suffered from gridlock, although we might have seen its opposite—policy whiplash. But with our Constitution calling for senators serving six-year terms, the president four, and House members two, it usually takes two successive biennial election victories to get the power to make major changes. Those who win every two years only to lose two years later do get the power to block further action. But this two-year-long time in power rarely carries with it the ability to undo previously enacted policy.

Thus, part of the reason government is so immobilized today is that the electorate has made sharply contradictory decisions every two years for the past four elections about who should be running government.

Of course this inconsistency cannot be blamed on everybody. Most people who vote regularly vote consistently for the same party—but some switch between the two for reasons I find lacking in rationality. Many others sometimes decide not to vote at all—with even less reason. But the point remains: The single biggest reason for the gridlock we have suffered since 2010 is the contradictory result of the past four elections, and the voters’ commitment to their policy preferences of the alternating sets of winners.

This fact, though, raises the question of why this electoral pattern, which we have seen before—in the Clinton years most recently—has not previously been so damaging to coherent governance. The answer is the second way in which voter behavior causes the current dysfunction. In this case, it is not the electorate as a whole that is responsible but a particular segment of it: the rigidly right-wing voters who dominate in the Republican primaries.

Again, part of the root of the problem is voters who don’t show up. Obama supporters who abstained in 2010 and 2014 helped create the stalemate. Moderate and mainstream conservative Republicans who disagree with their party’s militantly anti-compromise wing but eschew the primaries and vote only in November make the stalemate hard to break.

Public opinion polls that show a majority of Republicans oppose the tactics of the tea party-Freedom Caucus wing do not mean much to the winners of GOP primaries in which most of that majority has not voted. However, many nonvoting conservatives committed to responsible government offer little encouragement to Republicans in the House and Senate who are understandably worried about challenges from the far right.

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The drama over the Republican speakership makes this point very clear. The influence of the 40 or so Freedom Caucus members was self-evident. Less frequently noted, but just as important to the outcome, was the fear of angering the anti-compromise Republican voters who influenced the rest of the House GOP. Two very similar statements from John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy have gotten too little attention. In explaining why they walked away from a speakership contest, each gave as an important reason the unwillingness to make their friends in the caucus take a tough vote. The tough vote in question was not for a budget, nor to raise the debt limit. It was a public roll-call vote in support of a House speaker who was suspected of being insufficiently conservative—insufficiently conservative because Boehner and McCarthy were unwilling to shut down the government rather than concede on any point. This de facto transformation of an election for speaker into an ideologically charged GOP primary reinforces the destabilizing impact of the militancy that now dominates the Republican Party.

Future Republican speakers will be less able to provide some shield behind which members can support policies that are unpopular in the short term with some constituents, but which they agree are in the public interest. Boehner, for example, felt empowered to usher through a budget deal and avert serious harm to our economy—and his party—only after becoming a lame duck.

The celebration of John Boehner’s self-sacrifice has taken attention away from its meaning for the future. Two-thirds of the House Republicans opposed the budget deal. Paul Ryan’s denunciation of the process by which disaster was averted—and his pledge not to repeat it—completes the point. The no-compromise faction of the House Republicans—backed up by the heavy participation of their supporters in Republican primaries—lost this year’s battle, but in a way that leaves them very well-situated for the next one.

This is not a matter that can be resolved by greater personal efforts to promote cooperation in Washington. The problem is deeply rooted in the behavior of the voters, and, as we’re just a year away from the 2016 election now, the ballot box is the only arena where this conundrum can be resolved.